Microsoft Azure Named Fastest Cloud Service

The response times represent not only the cloud service's ability to respond from a given data center, but all the latencies of the last mile of service as the message moves off the Internet backbone and onto a local network segment. (Cloud vendors have no control over those latencies.) The results are an average for each vendor, a composite response time compiled from 90,000 browser calls a month to the target application placed in each service provider's cloud.

In that sense, the response times reflect what end users are likely to see "at the edge of the network," not the optimum performance of each cloud vendor, noted Ryan Bateman, manager of application performance management products at Compuware, who blogged about the test results. If you run your application at the site of a cloud vendor that's in your locale, the response times will improve.

That's evident in the rest of the results. CloudSigma is a European cloud supplier, with data centers in Bern, Switzerland, and Frankfurt, Germany. Its times are higher, but so are those of EC2's service site in Ireland. That reflects a preponderance of test pings arising in the United States, although Willoughby said about 37% of the bots are resident on consumer computers outside the United States, and roughly reflect the origins of cloud traffic.

The CloudSleuth monitoring and measurement service was established after Compuware's acquisition of the Gomez Web application performance measuring system in October 2009. It paid $295 million for the acquisition, and now offers end-user experience monitoring as a service to corporations.

We need more tools like CloudSleuth to develop a realistic picture of what cloud services can and cannot do for the enterprise. Amazon offers its own CloudWatch, and there are additional third-party services, including VMware's Hyperic, and Apparent Networks' network segment monitor. The smart cloud user will put all of these tools to use to figure out what kind of service he's getting.

Enterprise cloud adoption has evolved to the point where hybrid public/private cloud designs and use of multiple providers is common. Who among us has mastered provisioning resources in different clouds; allocating the right resources to each application; assigning applications to the "best" cloud provider based on performance or reliability requirements.